Dining Room Makeover

My dining room table was a hand-me-down from my Dad's house.  At the time all I really wanted was the hutch to house my HUGE collection of Disney snowglobes (I know, not the traditional way of using a china hutch, but I always thought of it as more of an oversized curio cabinet! LOL)  Anywho, the hutch and table were honey oak color that was screaming 1984 and not really my thing, but served a purpose...until I started watching HGTV (love that channel).  I saw them paint a dining room table and thought "Hey, I can do that!"

Only one major problem stood in the way, sanding!  What!  Sanding...I don't want to have to sand all of this to be able to paint it!  Not to mention we don't have a garage which meant this all needed to be done in the house.  Of course, that night I was on a mission to figure out how to re-do my 1984 dining set without sanding.  After a few hours of research I fell in love with this site.  Chris's inspiration was AMAZING!!  Love, love, love it!!!  And the best part was NO SANDING!!!

Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture of the way the dining room set looked before, but I did take quite of few of the process.  Since we don't have a garage (hint, hint honey...I NEED a garage!) all of this had to be done where else, but the middle of the dining room.  Of course the Mr. thought I had lost my mind and had forwarned me that if it came out like crap we were not going out and buying a new dining room set (I failed to mention that we were hosting Monday Night Football at our house that Monday and I had this crazy idea on Thursday).  Me, being the over confident one, set out on the mission  never looking back!

So our dining room was transformed to this:

Keep in mind that the only entrance to our kitchen is on the left hand side of this photo...Needless to say, the kids and I dined on McDonalds, doughnuts and PB&J's all weekend since we not only didn't have a place to eat but also no easy entrance to the kitchen (I know, I'm bound to win Mom of the Year award for that! LOL).

Then to this (you can kind of see a pic the "before" hutch on the right):

And this:

To finally this :)

Of course, I hadn't had my tablescape done yet, but this was good enough to have the guys over.  Later I decided I hated the backs of the chairs staying the oak color so I painted them as well.  Also when I did my tablescape, I decided that the antique brass pulls didn't work and I later switched them out to black round knobs.

I followed the directions exactly in Chris's post at Just a Girl and everything worked out perfectly!  The only thing I would add is that the paint has to cure about a good week or two before it will become resistant to dings.  I still think the key was in the primer.  I will never change from Zissner's Cover and Stain...Plus now I am a huge fan of the Benjamin Moore paint.  Worth every cent eventhough I had to call 4 different paint stores to find it and finally De Vaul paints in Santa Ana pulled through (yeah, that was fun trying to explain to the Mr. why I needed to go all the way to Santa Ana to buy paint when Ace hardware is across the street!)...Only took 2 coats to cover everything keeping in mind I used the cheap foam brushes from Wal-mart and a foam roller).

Total cost for the project:
Primer - $8
Paint - around $40 (I bought 2 cans because I wanted to make sure I didn't run out!)
Hardware - $30 from Lowes
Brushes and Roller - $10 (I bought a few extra roller brushes to switch in between coats)
Chair covers - $20 on clearance at JoAnns!  I still have a few yards of extra!!

Total cost $118!!! 
What a bargain for a whole new dining room set!!!  Plus I had extra paint, primer, and brushes for future projects :)  And yeah, the Mr. was very impressed with the final outcome ;)